The Other Side of Midnight (14 page)

Not too long ago, poverty, not affluence, bore the brunt of the blame for crime. Places like Buckmaster's Circle, Cashin Avenue and Chalker Place were thought to be where all the drugs came out of and all the stolen goods went into. But drugs don't just affect the public housing projects and the inmates at Her Majesty's Penitentiary. There is the guy heading home from a downtown binge scrunched behind the seat sniffing cocaine off a house key. There are the two drug-addled teenagers trying to sell stolen meat to feed their addiction. This is the world that taxi drivers inhabit. Their stories expose the dark underbelly of St. John's. But, as sociologist Elliot Leyton once pointed out, increasing awareness of a problem doesn't mean that the problem is increasing.

Over Aggressive—That's One Way to Put It

Darryl, driving and dispatching for forty years

According to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, in 2009, alcohol was
a contributing factor in over 60,000 car crash injuries in Canada.
While the rate of impaired driving has decreased over the last twenty-five
years, the taxicab drivers were clear that it once plagued the industry.
Of course, drinking and driving is a problem for society, not
just the taxi industry. In fact, most career drivers are adamant that
they have never driven a cab while intoxicated. Some, however, admitted
to drinking and driving in their youth. But not all taxi drivers
are drunks, just as not everyone who stumbles out of a downtown club
at three in the morning will get behind the wheel of a car.

When I first started out back in the late ‘70s, drinking and driving was rampant. You got to look at the era. No one went downtown like they do now. Everyone went to house parties and drove home. But people drove slower and there was a lot less cars on the road because a lot less people owned cars.

Take my father, for example.

As soon as school was let out for the summer, we used to go around the bay. There'd be Mom and Dad, us youngsters, probably a few cousins, maybe an aunt or an uncle, all loaded up in the biscuit truck. There'd be beds and dressers, everything in the truck, the whole family in the wooden box in the back of the truck.

If I head out there now, it's an hour and fifteen minutes. I've done it in an hour. With Dad, it took three hours, and sometimes four or five hours. Sometimes we wouldn't get there until dark.

There's a good reason for that. I'm sure Dad bought a beer at every club on the way out, him and my uncle. He could be full to the gills and drive around the bay no sweat. It wasn't that Dad could drive better drunk; it was the way he drove. Besides, it wasn't him you had to worry about; you had to worry about the idiots who ran through the stop signs at 100 clicks an hour.

You shouldn't drink and drive—that's not the point. The point is people drove and went a certain pace. Life was slower. It wasn't that way with the taxis. Some of us were over aggressive—that's one way to put it.

Super Ace was an old-school stand. Most of the drivers down there were either retired or career taxi drivers. Back then, you couldn't buy beer in the stores, and retailers didn't open until nine o'clock. Whoever was on a job closest to nine would buy the beer and bring it back to the stand. In the run of a week, it'd be nothing to have fifty or sixty dozen beer bottles to take back to the brewery. All hands were at it. It was a culture of boozebags.

I don't know how some of us never got killed, or worse. Joe Budgell was full one night and drove his car over an island and hauled the stop sign right up the chassis. With the car half off the ground and resting on the pole, Joe got down out of her and walked back to the stand with two or three lanes of traffic at a standstill watching the whole thing. Mel Kennedy worked with me at Capital Taxi. He bought a brand new Pontiac Parisienne, the one with the chrome splash panels high up on the door. She was gorgeous—an absolute gem. Not two weeks after he got her, right out of the wrapper, he had her parked down on Harvey Road, and another cabbie, loaded, opened her up from bumper to bumper. Poor Mel never got a cent out of it and had to get the car fixed himself. He drove that car for four years with the whole side Polybonded to shit. Every time I saw him get out of that car, I almost cried.

We used to call them “boo-boos.”

When you got back to the stand, there was always the usual questions from the operator:
Is she wrote off ? Was it your fault? Can
we get her on the road for a shift tomorrow evening?
They never asked anything like
Are you all right? Are the passengers hurt?
No matter who you talk to, that's the way it was. Getting the car back on the road was the number one priority.

You might've heard talk of how in the 1950s the cops and the fire department were at odds with one another. Sometimes the cops would show up at a fire and they'd be in the firemen's way and they would get sprayed down. It was the same scenario with the cops and taxi drivers. Once or twice a week, you'd hear over the radio that a kid was missing. The first place the cops would phone was the taxi stands.
Everyone keep an eye out for little Jimmy wearing
an orange coat. He's gone missing.
It's a numbers game. We got 364 cabs on the road, more than there were cops in the city.

But the cops had it burned up their arse about drivers flying around town. They were sick of it, and the provincial government was sick of it. That's when they introduced the points system. From their perspective, we were all guilty of something and it was just a matter of time before they figured out what.

A lot of those drivers were weekend warriors. They'd come out on a Friday with a pillow in the back so they could stay in the car and whack it to it and get a couple hundred for themselves. It'd be nothing for them to zoom down Water Street in the middle of the night doing 100 kilometres an hour trying to make the money as fast as they could. With hundreds of people stood up down around the stand, some of them out in the middle of the road trying to flag down cabs, there was bound to be accidents. One buddy popped a missus up over the bonnet and in through the windshield, like a moose. I think she died.

I had a customer in the car, a driver we all avoided like the plague. He was a real bastard when he was drinking. One Friday night, no one would pick him up, and I volunteered. It was a decent length of a run, and I wanted him out of the car as soon as possible. Flying up LeMarchant Road, the arse of her wasn't even through the lights at Prince of Wales Street, which had just turned red, when the cop's lights flashed. Cab drivers use a lot of foresight when it comes to traffic lights. Most people wouldn't because they don't drive enough to take heed. And not all traffic lights are the same. But if you're driving a cab long enough and passing them every day you know just how long they take to change. I could time some of them down to the second, I'm sure.

So I pulled in.

“You're in an awful rush tonight,” the cop said.

“Yeah, I am,” I said. “Look who I got in the back.”

He was a hard case; the cops knew he was a hard case. He had a record as long as your sleeve: possession, assault, theft. “I pity you, but I have to give you a ticket,” the cop explained. “If you were going a bit slower, I could've let you away with it.”

Getting the drunks off the street wasn't much of an excuse anymore.

Having said that, the drug of choice now is crack, cocaine, or pills. It's a bad set up. The last time I taxied was 1995, I think. That stand was pretty clean. It wasn't yet bleeding into the place. But it's a bad setup now. Don't get me wrong. There were guys drinking and driving and smoking dope, no doubt, but there were probably only a few who were into the hard stuff, and it was nowhere near the level it's at today. I'm not targeting them, because they were no different than any other stand. If you went to just about any stand and asked them what level of drug use is on the go they would tell you that no one there smokes dope. They're all basically full of shit. Any stand you want to mention is the same.

Dispatching one night, this guy, Craig, was driving his shift on acid. The stand owner realized he definitely wasn't high on something like a draw of weed, because you can tell the difference. Anyone who has had any involvement with drugs on any level knows if someone is on more than weed. You can tell, right? Craig, he's whacked on acid and driving a taxi. The stand owner used to spend a bit of time downtown. It would be nothing for him to come out of the club and to check out the stand and see what's on the go. He took the car and fired him. The next night, he gave him another car and another shift.

I thought about this one today. It was a bad accident, but it was a stupid accident. Chris Clark was a lunatic. He found out his wife was fucking around on him and drove his car right into some club downtown, right on in through the club. When he taxied in the early ‘80s, he used to drive a little Ford Fairmont. He was drag racing and missed the turn by Portugal Cove Road and New Cove Road and went right up onto the pole. It was totally reckless, and he got fired. This happened after I got off, sometime after the twelve o'clock shift ended. I didn't know it had happened until I went to work the next day. That afternoon, he phoned one of the brokers who had cars down to the stand. He put Chris in one. The stand owner fired him, and one of the brokers hired him again that same afternoon. There are worse things that have happened.

The broker said, “Take the car, and lay low. But don't go near the stand.”

What does Chris do? As soon as he got the car, he came down over the hill. At the time, you used to have to go to our standby stand a few streets over. You had to go park there and wait to be called to go over, because we were only allowed four cars there at any one time. You'd rotate, basically. Meanwhile, I had heard that he'd had an accident the night before, but I didn't know the details. I called a few more cars to come over, and one of them happened to be Chris's.

“Next at the standby.”

“Seven.”

“All right,” I said. “Come over.”

Sure enough, he pulled up. He got out of his car, and the stand owner looked out the window. As calm as anything, he said, “Come up, I want you for a second, Chris.”

I might be a bit dramatic, but this is the way I remember how it went down. There was a big set of steps on the back of the dispatch office, and I could hear Chris coming up. As soon as I heard his feet hit the floor, I heard a pop. The stand owner dropped him like a sack of potatoes. Blood and snots went everywhere. After all was said and done, Chris got himself together and went back out and worked his shift. If it was my car, I would've given me a good punch in the face, too. It was because of what he had done to the car. It's one thing to be in an accident speeding on a straightaway and hitting a gravel patch. If you're drag racing and you put a car up on the pole, man, that's over the top.

Do you know what the ongoing joke at the stand was for a long, long time?
You got no taxi licence, because you haven't been fired yet.
If you got fired today, don't worry about it, you can have a car at four o'clock the next day for your shift that night. Don't sweat it.

I Won't Touch a Drop

Theodore, driving for thirty-eight years

I remember two years in a row on New Year's Eve I got a $100 tip for taking guys home and not bringing them to their parked car. I wouldn't take them to their car. No, sir. I've often been going down Water Street and Duckworth Street and saw someone who was going to their car drunk. I'd pull over and say, “If you get in that car, I'll phone the police.” This is a 24/7 city. You can't be out there driving around drunk. I'm sixty years old, and I've done my share of it. Jesus, when I was around twenty or twenty-one all of us were drinking and driving. But the traffic wasn't on the roads. At one time, you could drive from Torbay Road to the Goulds and you might run into two or three cars.

But I got nailed in 1980, and that taught me a lesson.

The last time I drove someone around looking for their car, I think the meter went up to $50. The man was gone—he was gone. He said, “Help me find my car.”

I said, “Where is it to?”

“I don't know.”

“Now you're in some cruel old shape. Where do you usually park?”

This was when they first opened the parking garage down by City Hall. They used to use the one up in Sebastian Court. I tried there. Nothing. I went up and down Duckworth Street. I went down Water Street. I went up and down all the side streets. You know where we found the car? On the wrong side of the road up over Amherst Street.

There ended up being fifty-odd dollars on the meter. Back then that was real coin.

This is what buddy said to me: “I couldn't get a taxi.”

I told him, “Next time, leave the car home. As long as you haven't got the car, the temptation isn't there.” Phone the stand until you get through, or book the cab in advance. But don't take your car downtown.

I hate to think that there are guys out there drinking and driving a taxi. I just can't see it. There's a time and place for everything. No one likes a bottle of beer more than I do. But I won't touch a drop while I'm in this car.

The Rich Man's Drug

Frank, driving for twenty-nine years

A taxicab driver rushed into a convenience store to get gas and
to grab a snack before he hit the road again. Behind him, a young man
hauled up in a new truck and asked the clerk if he was interested in
buying some fresh meat: steaks, chicken, fish. To the taxicab driver,
the stuff was clearly hot. When the young man left, there was talk at
the counter that he was somehow involved in drugs. On the floors and
on the back seats of taxis, drivers often find discarded baggies with
knots tied at the top. It's from customers having a “bump,” or a quick
fix. Throughout the city, taxis drop off strung out twenty-somethings
to all-night parties, to crack houses, where they go to get high. Because
taxicab drivers service every segment of our society—the lower class,
the middle class, the upper class, the rich and the poor—the interviews
included in the following monologues offer a glimpse into the pervasiveness
of drug use.